“We are bleeding at the roots,…

“We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table” ~D.H. Lawrence

Most members of the herd have never tasted solitude, adventure, or otherworldliness. They are caught up in the rat race, trapped in their cultural conditioning, stuck in religious indoctrination, imprisoned in political brainwashing. They’ve lost sight of the underlying essence. They've sacrificed their wildness for mildness. And when their life requires a little bite, they discover that they have no teeth.

Culture has become a tyrant. We’re overly domesticated, overly governed, and overly lawyered. Our hearts have become machines, there’s no feeling, no hunger, no soul. There’s only prescribed conditioning, unhealthy excess, and mealymouthed one-upmanship. It’s time to rebel.

When culture itself is a tyrant, heroism must become an act of existential rebellion. The hero’s journey must become a quest to seek union with cosmos, to reunite Nature and the human soul, and to reawaken God within. The hero must face the dragon of cultural conditioning with the courage to recondition it.
Gary Z McGee